HOW DOES LIGHTNING KNOW? ©
by
Jim Chapman
“Get me another glass o’ whiskey,
darlin’,
this clarity’s frightenin’.”
Peter McNaughton
ROAD TO HOLY
*(+
JERUSALEM
LEAVING HOME
-On the way to the airport,
from inside the darkness of the taxi,
I see a baby,
running naked
down the middle of the highway,
in front of us.
-I yell at the cab driver to stop.
-He snorts inside his white beard, confused.
-In his decrepit car with its next-to-worthless headlights, he doesn’t see what looks to be a very young child in front of us. This could only happen at 4:30 in the morning, completely in the dark. There are no other cars on the road.
That I had chosen to sit in the front seat, where I could see the road, saved the little child’s life.
-I yell at him to stop, again. I can tell that he still doesn’t understand what I’m yelling about, but he does stop.
-I jump out of the taxi and pick up the child, maybe three years old, terrified and screaming loudly, while the driver (he says that his name is Mike, the Santa Man) calls 911. I stand in the middle of the street with this little weight in my arms who, except for a small shirt, has nothing on and is crying and shaking.
-One fortunate thing, among many other fortunate things that morning, is that we find ourselves stopped in front of a small motel. I bang on the dark window of the door. An Indian couple, the owners of the motel as it turns out, appear and offer to help out, after I try to explain what has happened.
-They are as nonplussed as I am.
I must have awakened them, while certain that I am dreaming.
-Mike runs into the motel lobby, where I am holding the child (wondering if I am going to be peed upon in my crisp airplane clothes) and asks me if it's a boy or a girl?
-I think, or rather, don’t think, “How am I supposed to know?”
-But for only a moment I wonder, and then, oh, yeah, I just hold him up (a him, as it turns out) and look. He’s so small and so like a little puppy.
-Vague thoughts about missing my flight crowd in.
-Incredibly, the police arrive within minutes.
-As we leave, I tell the officer to wrap up the naked little guy, whom he has riding on top of the gun in his belt. The little boy is shivering and crying and very tiny and as we drive away the cabbie yells out his open window, back at the cops, "Getta blanket!”
-None of this seems real to me as we head to the airport. Mike and I try to piece it all together as we ride on in the darkness.
+
Of all the small stars
In the deep night sky
This one that falls here
Has me asking why
The small warm star stuff
Scared of aloneness
Left his firmament
And swerved into mine
+
-A child, untimely torn from his mother and father by drugs, or abuse, or some other lurking flaw, runs, seeking shelter in a larger world.
–In the airport, I share all this with the woman at the newsstand, who couldn’t look more matronly and normal. She tells me that she has seen enough cop shows, CSI especially, to know that both the parents must certainly be dead, that the door had been left unlocked on purpose and the child found his way out that way.
-There really is no other way to look at it, she proffers, with determined certainty.
-“Normal” turns out to be far from it this morning.
-Really, the way people, all around us, every day, explain life to themselves amazes me.
-Maybe she’s right, I think, but the way out of this conundrum sounds as crazy as the way in, yet I was there to see the way in myself.
-I am in no position to counter her suggestion. I promise myself to find out what happened when I return.
An Unnerving Way to Begin
-The lovely, wonderful clouds of Oregon and the rising sun offer a transcendent way out of the darkness.
-The sparkling waves off the Bay welcome me to San Francisco. After a short stop, I enter the long, strange tube from which I hope wondrously to emerge in Israel. I already find my mind abuzz with the other-worldliness of my trip, which has now acquired the faint vibrations of a pilgrimage.
I Leave America
-I'm on the plane to Tel Aviv, sitting next to Ehud, an Israeli who lives near the old city of Jerusalem. While trying to explain why I am going to Israel, I tell him that one of my daughters is marrying a Jew.
-He asks if that is all right with me.
-That puzzles me.
-Whatever makes the Middle East the complicated place that I have always suspected becomes more apparent.
-I say that I couldn’t be happier, and that that is only the half of it, that another of my daughters has married a Muslim and that we are, all of us, proud to be one big family.
-He thinks that over for a few moments, slowing the conversation down a bit, and we remain silent for a period of time, but eventually the airline staff comes by to offer us dinner. We choose to agree that a glass of wine solves many problems. Maybe if the flight were shorter and we were not forced to be together for the duration, we might never have said another word to each other. But it’s a long way to the ends of the Earth. Plenty of time to restart our conversation.
-A tactic for negotiations in the Middle East?
-The flight is reminiscent of a trip taken long ago across the English Channel, in a hovercraft, with the choppy sea rattling my teeth.
-My thoughts return again and again to the child running down the street. It so reminds me of the famous picture from Vietnam, of the naked little girl running to escape the horror of napalm, another of our flaws, another tragedy.
-An hour outside Tel Aviv, jewishly, muslimly groggy, I marvel at the difficulty of sitting still for so long,
talking to a person so marginally interested in what I might have to say, waiting for the beginning of the journey to end.
THEY CALL IT THE HOLY LAND
-I arrive in the afternoon, find my hotel, and start walking.
-I am one of those people who believe that the world lends itself to being examined intently, on foot.
-Minutiae add up to hours that add up to our lives.
-Right Now. Right Here.
-There seems nothing appropriate to say to a dirty woman who asks for money right now except “Here.”
-OK?
-OK.
-Nothing separates the grains of sand right here from the stars in the galaxy out there.
-Now, in the continuum of my consciousness.
-Walking brings me to my senses.
-When I can walk, I try to hold my eyes wide open and allow the effervescence of life to tumble and foam all about me, sometimes tingling, sometimes blinding, sometimes mingling with and washing away my tears, continually pushing hard on Life to share its secrets.
-With the right pair of sunglasses, I have learned to walk and cry at the same time, without stepping in front of a bus.
-Walking is a long, languid dream out in the open.
-The boardwalk along the coast extends for miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers) affording the perfect palliative for my jetlag, viz., just keep moving. I collapse in an outdoor restaurant adjacent to the beach and the Mediterranean Sea, and order labane and eggplant.
-Listening to the muezzin, the Muslim call to prayers, texting Deb, I rest my eyes on the calmness of the water that stretches from here to Rhodes, and beyond.
-Labane is a Middle Eastern-style cheese, made of yoghurt, not unlike a cheese version of hummus, served in a circle around the tomatoes, eggplant and spices and olive oil in the center. On the sound system in the background, "I give him all my love, that's all I do," just these words, go on and on and on, techno style.
-Civilized little restaurant; as the sun goes down and the wind rises, they hand out blankets.
-In a touch of home away from home, I find Columbia Crest, an Oregon wine, on the menu.
-Is it important to Israelis, this feeling that they are able to distinguish the good from the bad, what’s right from what’s evil?
-Are they sure that they have this quality?
-Of infallibility, like the Pope?
-This tendency, this self-assuredness, does seem to come more naturally to religion than to politics. Though the more I learn about the Middle East, the harder it is to tell one from the other.
-Is it possible to have the ability to critically pick apart a good poem from a bad poem, to be absolutely certain inside the literary world, and yet, to be unable to tell goodness from badness itself, in the world outside?
-Do Israelis feel that they are exceptional? Because they are Israelis, or Jewish or immigrants? Because they are outcasts or democrats in an undemocratic world, or what?
-What about the exceptionalism of America? Immigration? Wide-open spaces? Room to dream? Do we still believe in all that? What trauma might it take, to undo our personal myths?
-No one wants to know.
-In the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv, seeing how hard people have to work to make a living in what is probably the most successful city in the most successful country in the Middle East makes me realize how independently we Americans can afford to live as families, without extended family relationships, whereas here, hanging together, depending on one another, puts a survivor’s exigencies before personal indulgences.
-Bit of luck with the visa to Jordan. If I hadn't gotten to their embassy today, they wouldn't have been open again until Sunday. Whew! And there are no more hotel rooms to be had in Tel Aviv.
-I actually find the "hassle" of trying to get a visa as interesting as going to a museum or seeing old buildings. In order to get a visa, I had to find a photographer who would take a passport photo and so I found myself prowling around in alleys and tentatively entering small, non-descript doorways to make it happen. I enjoy seeing how countries work. Tours deprive a traveler of that.
-From what I’d heard of the Middle East before I arrived, it’s amazing to see young people hang on each other, lying on top of one another in the sand, kissing.
-Having lunch in front of my hotel.
-Waiter says, "Enjoy"
-How can I not?
-"I realize the view is a bit 'arsh but we are working on it"
-In Israel, unlike in Oregon where I look west and imagine China or Japan, I stare out over the horizon and there are Rhodes, Malta and Venice, and Crusader ships arriving more than a thousand years ago, for some ungodly, godly reason.
-A distinct feeling of being in Brooklyn, with palm trees.
-It borders on the inconceivable that Israelis aren't trying harder to solve the mess that they are in; the country is so undeniably wonderful, as an example of the resiliency of the human spirit. But for a people this dedicated to survival not to figure out an answer to this conundrum is ridiculous. While I sit here in a streetside cafe and read the Jerusalem Post, with story after story of rockets smuggled and nuclear weapons debated and settlements built, even though ordered dismantled, it's hard to believe that it's not some sort of trumpet call.
-Gideon, where are you?
-There are certainly walls that need bringing down.
-Arak and grapefruit juice. Good stuff.
-The Palestinians are like the people in Orlando who saw Walt Disney come into their sleepy backwater and when he then transformed their orange groves into undreamed-of architecture and a new cultural universe, they then resented how well it turned out. They continue to imagine that they can simply send Walt home and replant the orange trees.
-If only the Israelis had paid cash for this land.
-What would have been the price?
-What will be the price now?
-A beautiful spring evening
in Tel Aviv.
-I find strawberries lying on the beach. Why would anyone abandon these strawberries?
-Cats.
-Cats everywhere.
-In fact, one of them just pooped in the potted plant near me in the restaurant.
-Downwind, fortunately.
-Which hasn’t affected this being the best cappuccino since Italy.
-A big, hulking, smiling guy walks by on the promenade, with an armful of roses, maybe for his girlfriend, while the next people to pass by, a couple, look very disappointed in each other. The first guy doesn’t notice them and they don’t notice him. Just a difference of a few meters separates them, but they are in entirely different universes, unaware of the other’s existence.
-Watching them, because I notice both, I feel myself to be the glue that sticks their lives together, before they come unstuck and move on.
-We all live next to each other, back to back for some of us, face to face for others.
-I indulge my penchant for interrogating waiters.
-It might just come down to this: who wants this land more?
-Are Palestinians more of this land than they are Arab? Are Jews more a part of this land than they are Israeli? Who is most a part of this land?
-What bestows the most legitimacy?
-Time?
-Guns?
-God?
-Patience?
-Walking away from the beach, it's hard to leave this sybaritic outpost for the ascetic interior.
-Who are the Israelis who deny the Israeli-Arabs the vote, refuse to give any tax money that the state collects from the Palestinians back to their community and will not allow some of the most common goods, like cilantro, into the occupied areas on the excuse that it might compromise national security and then are perplexed when some people condemn them as oppressors? I haven't met those Israelis.
L’CHAIM’S A BEACH
-In a taxi, on the way to Jerusalem, I can now say that I have, indeed, met one of the Israelis who thinks of Palestinians as animals and can hardly believe that other people consider Israelis to be oppressors. In the time it took to drive to Jerusalem, I got into a long discussion with my cab driver, an Israeli named Shimon Levy. He joined the army years ago and now his son does military service, and for him, the army must and will protect Israel from all its enemies, of which there are many.
-We talked long and hard about the Jews and the Arabs ("garbage") and whether Obama is a friend of the Jews or not. He thinks not. He has no use for Arabs, but scorns, also, the Haredim (one who trembles in awe at the word of God), the ultraconservative Jews who refuse to serve, and who even refuse to recognize the state of Israel as a spiritual authority.
-He says that he has a lot of American friends and I asked him if they agreed with him or me. They all seemed to work for Goldman Sachs and were (surprise) on his side. I told him that most of the people at my local country club were on his side too.
-I told him that I had a lot of opinions, my wife thinks too many.
-He liked that. He feels that Obama is weak. I tried to make the point that it is difficult to convince someone that you would die for them, without actually dying for them.
-Our conversation almost came to a complete halt when I told him that I did not support America in the Vietnam War. The word “peace,” I will discover, curls many a lip in this part of the world.
- He feels more comfortable with war than with peace. Simplicity trumps nuance. One needn’t trust the person in one’s gun-sight. After all, the reason we shake right hands is to prove that we don’t have a knife.
-As we drive up and away from the coastal lushness, I am entranced by all the rock, and the barrenness.
-Where’s the milk?
-Where’s the honey?
-Yes, all is light.
-No, nothing is clear.
-As I travel between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the centuries seem to whiz past like roadside mileposts.
-My little, funky hotel, an Arab hotel as it turns out, in East Jerusalem, has an endearing characteristic: of all the people I've run into in Israel, here, they speak the best English.
-Everywhere is stone; everywhere is hard.
-Shimon asked me, "Why can't they just leave us alone?"
-As if the Arabs might not have had the same thought in 1917.
-That seems so naive. I couldn't decide if he thought that Arabs were evil, or just stupid. And right after this discussion, I walk into the Alcazar Hotel and meet the Arab proprietor and he is perfectly reasonable and accommodating.
-My mind struggles to hold together such competing realities.
-Shimon, the cab driver, as soon as he sees where I plan to stay, says I should try to do better. Any plan that he may have entertained of inviting me home to dinner, now felt unlikely. I do admit that I am surprised at the location of the hotel. I remember, now, that I had trouble finding the hotel on the map as I made my reservation. I had intended to stay the entire time inside the Old City’s walls, but I decide to give this place a try. I am shown to my simple room and notice a mosque and its distinctive minaret directly across the street.
Is there such a place as a poor, clean country? When I leave the Alcazar Hotel and walk down through the neighborhood between here and the Old City, I pass lines of old cars parked higgledy-piggeldy on the sidewalk, which forces everyone to walk in the street, with cars and buses honking and swerving around us. The little stores that line the street, with their open fronts crammed with cases of plastic water bottles and soda, signs advertising all kinds of ice cream, the bored guy on a cell phone sitting on the steps, with cardboard boxes and dirty-smelling water in puddles everywhere. All this might be anywhere—Martinique, Kuala Lumpur, outside Cancun, Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, Naples, all places where the people, while never having seen anything of the lives of the people in any of the other places, assume that they have all independently created their own respective worlds.
-So, with no air conditioning and a very loud demonstration going on down in front of my hotel, I feel like I'm in a scene of the movie, A Year of Living Dangerously.
-Well, Richard told me to see something other than modern Jerusalem and this area is it. If this hotel were anywhere else, it would rate moderately well, but being in the industrial area and with the call to prayers being sung at their prescribed hours outside my window, I have to rate it lower. The demonstration and fireworks last night, rather than being political, was a marriage celebration. The owner of the hotel told me not to worry, "Old habits, you know." Maybe he was reassuring me about the explosions.
-I decide, based on my inability to identify any of the dishes set out for breakfast at the hotel, to treat myself to breakfast at the American Colony Hotel. I walk over here and sit down in the most wonderful, Middle Eastern courtyard, all large painted tiles and fruit trees. It probably costs as much to eat here as a night's stay at the Alcazar.
As an example of how far off the beaten track the Alcazar hotel is, whenever I ask directions from an Arab, I get this look as in "what!" and then they can't be more helpful. I seem to be in the industrial district. I’ll move into the Armenian hospice tomorrow, to be inside the old city walls. Gotta try it all.
-Now inside the Old City and ascending Al Wad Street, I am thinking that the only more confusing city I have ever tried to know is Venice. Is it possible to make sense of all the chaos I see around me?
-Just at that moment a blind man, alone, passes me. He can only count on other people and sounds to help him.
I can’t stop watching him. What might only be excruciating in America is a miracle here. There's not much else to say.
-Having stumbled on The Armenian Hospice, and because, when I had first booked myself into the Alcazar Hotel and had thought that it lay inside the city walls where I really wanted to be, I decide to change hotels. That the Via Dolorosa passes directly by the front door seemed an added bonus, and it costs less.
-Inside the walls, there seem to be hordes of people coming from somewhere, and no matter which way I walk, I feel myself swimming upstream, against ancient currents.
-I think they are Arabs, praying, though Ossis, the clerk at The Armenian Hospice, says that they are, in fact, Christians, retracing Jesus’ steps on the way to his crucifixion, so many years ago.
-People forget nothing here.
-I opt to start walking, putting my map away. Not a single person in the world knows where I am, and I have no place I need to be, at any particular time. Even to imagine adhering to a schedule or an itinerary in this cascading torrent of languages and smells and music and hopes, both realistic and not, seems self-defeating.
-Rather, I seek to be a cork and float.
-Naturally, I become completely lost.
But it is said that to be lost in one’s own city is to be closer to God.
-Bobbing corks can’t lose their way.
-I'm not sure I have ever seen a place quite like Jerusalem. The noise is deafening and the bargaining, exhausting. The covered streets bubble and churn with life.
-For a little solitude, I just have to go into a church.
-For a holy city, the churches sit remarkably empty.
-What is it that makes this place different from, say, Piazza San Marco on a similar day? While there is the same crush of people, the grittiness and intensity of purpose startles me. No one lets up here.
-Everyone's fingernails here are hard, old, and have been pulled out too many times.
-Stopped for a beer. 0.0 percent. Surprise. Muslims prefer that there be no alcohol inside the old city, at least in their section of Paradise.
-Walking down, or up, it's kind of hard to tell, I helped a Bedouin write a "going out of business" sign. When I asked where he was going, he said "Basle." We shared a glass of orange juice, but I had to leave, feeling claustrophobic. I want to get outside the walls, even though I have just moved in. I can’t breathe. It's going to take some time to crack this city open.
-It's Shabbat, Friday. Haredim day.
-Everywhere is stone; everywhere is hard.
-Sitting outside the old city walls, having a salad, considering a return to my hotel by going back into the ancientness, but knowing I will again get lost.
-How many peoples have Jews feared?
Contrast that with the number of peoples that America has had to fear.
-Remembering that Shimon said that the basis of the Jews’ claim to Jerusalem is that King David built the city and thus, it is part of their covenant with God. Except that, it was after that point that God, because the Jews had reverted to worshipping the gods of antiquity, exiled the Jews and destroyed the walls of Jerusalem.
-Is it too simplistic to consider this a revocation of their title to this place, this city, Jerusalem?
-Did they abandon Jerusalem when they abandoned God?
-A tour bus just passed, "Eternity Travel".
-In the Garden of the Tomb, one of two possible places where they buried Jesus, people are praying right and left. The other place is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, inside the walls of the old city. I suppose you have to go to both in order to be sure you’ve gotten to the right tomb.
-In spite of all the praying, people do tend to look a bit more familiar to me, an American, than they do at other sites. This is definitely the choice of Middle America.
-No matter in which quarter I find myself, deemed holy by whichever faith, there is a palpable Presence in all the smoothly dirty stones, and in the eyes of all those about me, though the Christians seem to be more in the vacation mode.
-That is, until I am run over by a group of Brazilians carrying a cross and chanting. I follow them into the Coptic Patriarchate Church.
-When I sat down in the shade to jot this down, I found myself completely alone, a rarity in the old city, but before I wrote one sentence, I was surrounded by a group of Germans.
-As an example of navel-gazing, there is a woman painting a picture of the Coptic Church and the tourists all taking pictures of her, not, instead, of the church. I am too close to be able to take a picture of them taking a picture of the picture of the church in front of them that she is painting.
No one's really looking at the church.
Art swallowing Reality.
ARealiTy.
I am in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
I touched the entrance stone and put in a prayer for Mitch, my young next door neighbor who is fighting off brain cancer in the only way a nine year old boy can, with tears and incomprehension, yet with the ability to dive back into daily life as soon as he feels the least bit better.
This place couldn't be any more different in feel from the garden tomb,
which was so peaceful.
-Given all the incense, mysterious light and crowds, I would say that the people are voting for this spot as Jesus' tomb.
I'm listening in to a guide who is saying that the mother of Constantine, who came to Jerusalem with an unlimited American Express card, constructed this church in 360 C.E. Sumptuous.
Reminds me of St. Marks in Venice.
I light a candle for Mitch. His candle is the first one in line.
+
Wanting
Everybody Wanting
So Much
Everybody Wanting
For Everything
Everybody
Finding Themselves
Wanting
God
Wanting
Nothing Else
+
-I walked over to the Plaza of the Western Wall—the Wailing Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. Instead of using candles, as in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, to pray at The Wall, you write your prayer on a slip of paper and stick it in the cracks of the hot stones. The clear, azure sky extends above me to forever, the stones of the remains of the original temple that David built 3000 years ago. Under the pitiless sun, in the open air and white rock, this Sanctus Sanctorum couldn't be more unlike the Church of the Holy Sepulcher with its sense of smoky, deeply buried mystery.
-And in the background, looming over the Wailing Wall is the golden dome of the Al Aqsa Mosque.
-Three faiths, all convinced that they are right.
-There is a strange jealousy on the part of all these versions, and even within all these versions, of the same
God.
-No one wants you to belong to anyone else.
-There is no room here for the small, self-contained vision of the Individual.
No place for saying to God, "I don't need You. I know what I'm doing."
-Hooray. A small victory. I found Jaffa Gate all by myself.
-A modest rule of thumb: in Israel, resist eating near a potted plant in an outdoor restaurant, with cats around.
-Jerusalem, swamped with garbage, may be the navel of the world, but there is much too much bellybutton lint.
-First night inside the old city.
-Sure is noisy.
–Surprising number of cars.
-The streets just aren't that wide.
- The next morning, I venture outside the walls to the David Citadel Hotel to sign up for a tour to Masada and the Dead Sea for tomorrow. The concierge asks where I am staying. When I say, inside the old city, I think that he asks me if I have a sofa. I get the idea that he doesn’t have a high regard for the hotel options inside the walls. We eventually figure out that he means a cellphone.
-This is going to be a really hot day to head for the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane.
-I leave the cool of the hotel lobby and walk all the way around the walls of the city. The sensation of ageless immensity impresses me; the actual, small physical size of the Old City surprises me. As I round the walls, on the opposite side of the city from the David Hotel, I can see the entire Mount of Olives, replete with grave stones and more rocks, spread out before me. The heat from the reflected sunlight off the hillside, from the walls behind me, from the Sun itself, the source of all inspiration to ages of these benighted peoples, and, not least, the exhaust from thousands of idling buses, saps me of my desire to walk to the top. So, when I get to the bottom of the Mount of Olives, a cabby asks me if I want a ride. I had intended to hike to the summit, but when I’m by myself I enjoy changing my plans, enjoy interacting with the flow of time and circumstances. I take him up on it.
-He wants to know if I am a believer. I say, “No.” He says he isn’t either. He wants me to hire him to take me all over Israel. I settle on 15 shekels to the mountaintop.
-When I get there, Jerusalem lies off in the distance like a faded oriental carpet spread out on the dirt. The bad air (which I thought was smog but turns out to be a storm of desert dust) renders it all the more indistinct.
-I get an old Arab to let me have a picture with him and his donkey.
-"Kiss, kiss" he tells the donkey as he takes my hand and sticks it in the donkey's face. It has big, soft lips and as it smiles, I involuntarily shy away from its huge teeth. I hope my sunburned fingers didn't look like little carrots.
-All the other tourists who surround us, admiring the old man and his ancient air, but only surreptitiously taking pictures of him so they don’t have to pay, put me off. I never begrudge paying people for a service rendered.
-Having a coffee, a cappuccino in the little Arab village of El Tur. Good coffee but a fellow customer sets this big water pipe next to me and prepares to light it. I ask him what's in the pipe, as he sits there with a cigarette in his one hand and holding the mouthpiece up to me with the other. I manage not to take it, but it takes a lot of nodding and bobbing and smiling.
We part friends.
-Unlike Deb, I didn't read the guidebook until I had already climbed the mountain and, only then did I discover that all the churches close at noon (it's now 2:00) and you can't go in wearing shorts anyway. Someday I'll learn.
-Leaving the Mount of Olives, I re-enter the coolness inside the walls. Walking through the old city, besides the sheer number of people, waves of smells crush me: saffron, coriander, mint, cooking meat, tobacco smoke from giant hookahs, green spices, red spices, purple pickled cauliflower! And above it all I hear, "Mister, mister, come into my shop!"
-There are many articles in the Israeli press about the ultra-orthodox and how they are so far outside mainstream thinking. They refuse military service, do not have to speak English or even go to any school, except for religious instruction in the Torah. They do not consider Israel to be the legitimate government of the state. Only God can claim that. In fact, the local newspaper says that if you include the Arab population, half of all the first graders in Israel are not receiving an education that is in any way supportive of the existence of the state of Israel.
There are many articles here about not wanting to be the new South Africa, but there are a lot of similarities between the Haredim and the Boers. South Africa made a choice and Israel must choose, also.
Reading the Israeli papers, everyone here seems to appreciate the immense problems of co-existence, to be unanimous in a desire to solve them, and bewildered by the lack of obvious solutions. In circumstances this extreme, I can only applaud them. Throughout history, Jews, considering their small numbers, have influenced human experience more than any other group I can think of. Now the awkward question is, can the Israeli experiment further the Jewish future?
-An Israeli cab driver calls the Arabs "garbage," a group of people who represent 20 percent of the population of Israel. In America, calling so large a part of our own people “garbage” would be condemned.
-It has to be condemned here.
+
-Israel juxtaposes existential angst with mundane impatience.
+
-I love the vibrancy of this place. Right outside the restaurant there is a large group dancing. How can you not love it? They can't all do the dance, but everyone is trying.
-I do have to admit that while watching the people dance, if this were America, I wouldn't be worried about being blown up. I walk here, not on solid ground, but on a tightrope.
-Why do people hate other people?
-I snarl at my inability to understand.
-I came all this way to find only more questions.
-If we can ask an intelligent question, doesn’t that suggest that we have the intelligence to provide an answer?
-We're here for such a short amount of time, will I rather die with a question on my lips, or an answer?
-And even if one believes this to be only a stop on the way to God, why the hatred?
-In front of the restaurant, people dance.
-People still dance!
-One comes to Jerusalem to feel.
-So far, so good.
ARABS AND ISRAELIS ARE COUSINS
-I was asked the directions to St. Georges Cathedral by the spitting image of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marples, as I imagine her.
-Maybe, she can clear up these mysteries.
-It's difficult to appear crisp in this heat. Only the Jewish men and the Arab women pull it off. There is a slightly bewildered look to everyone else.
-I had a long talk with an Arab man this morning, and he said that the Israelis and the Arabs are cousins, descendants of Moses but by two different wives.
-Later, getting a chance to engage a Jewish acolyte in the Ohel Yitzhak Synagogue, I asked him why he was studying and discussing a book that is so many thousands of years old, which so many people have picked apart in so many different ways, and in which the words themselves haven't changed in all that time. Hadn't it all been figured out by now?
He gives me the impression that they are just getting started.
"Hey, we're Jews," he says. "You know what they say—two Jews, three opinions.” "
-He confirmed that Arabs and Jews really are, according to the story, first cousins.
-All the more puzzling in that he doesn’t seem puzzled that this extended family is at each other’s throats.
-Here, the waters of life mix badly with the blood of generations.
-He even doubts, somewhat, my Walt Disney analogy, but more because he considers Uncle Walt an anti-Semite.
-Rather than wonder, we wander.
-Points easily get lost here.
-To enter the area of the mosque is astonishingly difficult. No one makes it easy, the harsh sun least of all.
-On the vast (for Jerusalem) plateau of the Al Aqsa Mosque, the identification of all these religions with light and heat, with the starkness of loss, the determination for redemption, and the terror of insignificance slams into me.
-I try to personalize Eternity.
I like how the women and children use the Dome of Chains as a picnic area.
+
-Christianity is smoke.
-Islam is light.
-Judaism is conversation.
+
-This plaza is so big, and so flat, and so hot.
-Back in the Armenian Hospice, I get my room key and an expostulation on how the Christians have many problems with the Muslims and the Muslims with the Jews and the Jews with the Christians and the Muslims with the Christians, etc., but of them all, the Druze are the worst.
-They are extra, extra bad.
-Even worse than the Syriacs.
-In fact, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, there are so many factions represented there—Catholic, Orthodox, Copt, Armenian, and others—that in order to open the church every day, they've turned the job over to a Muslim because no one trusts anyone else.
-Good Grief!
-I just noticed that it is 91 degrees here in Jerusalem and 45 degrees at home.
-Time to do some laundry.
-I've come back to Holy Sepulcher Church to get a picture of the candle that I lit for Mitch. It makes the third time today that I have been in the Presence of God according to some major faith. They are all less than a mile from each other!
-Come on, people, it can't be this hard to make it work!
-I must be gaining that otherworldly look in my eye; people are starting to ask me for directions.
-I've always noticed that overseas there are so many more shops catering to men's fashions, than at home, where women’s shops predominate.
-Why does anyone even want this old city?
-“Holy” affords a rationale for the madness of not-knowing for sure.
+
-I love Arabs for their simplicity.
-I love Jews for their complexity.
-For Christians, Love is all one.
+
-According to Joseph Campbell, the hero of Christianity is Jesus, but the hero of Judaism is the Jewish people.
-Big difference.
-For Jews, you achieve redemption as a race, rather than as an individual.
Someone asked the rabbinical student why Jews have been so reviled and he replied that it was because they have been so successful and other people resent that, but that seems so simplistic. Jews have not always been successful. What are the roots of anti-Semitism? What are the roots of racism, for that matter?
-Maybe the next trip is to India. This monotheism stuff is wearing me out.
MASADA
-Up early to go to Masada, all the shops are closed and schoolchildren fill the streets.
-Just getting started with a tour, I can see why I don't do it this way more often: so much confusion, standing around, everyone looking at everyone else, puzzled, the inevitable missing person.
-I read in the local paper that Jerusalem qualifies as the poorest city in Israel. It does seem scruffy, but I thought it was because of the crush of tourists. It seems that all those tourists don't translate into dollars, or shekels as the case may be. One-third of the Jews and two-thirds of the Arabs live under the poverty level.
-Being part of a tour, even for this small amount of time, I feel ever so much like a sheep, following a shepherd. Which may be why sheep appear so placid. They are spared the need to think. True, because I travel alone so often and must think on my own, I often make mistakes. It would sound appropriate to say here that undoing mistakes is part of traveling, but I still kick myself later for some of my wrong turns and missed opportunities.
-But it’s about stories I bring back with me.
-For as long as I live, it will be my experiences, as a husband, as a father, as a traveler and seeker that will define me.
-And, oh yeah, as a golfer.
-Without golf, I would never have found the glaciated valleys of northern Scotland.
-Those rocks, barren and rounded by ice, reside in a different star system from the cracked-and-broken-by-sun rocks of Masada, which, near the lowest point on Earth, towers imperiously above a desolate, impossible landscape.
-No golf here.
-Herod chose this place for his palace.
-Without water then, without water now, Masada will remain forever meaningfully nonsensical.
-I plan on walking down from the fortress, in effect breaking away from the group, when the guide begins to make the case that to walk now would be to inconvenience everyone else. And if that reason were insufficient, he lets us know that people have died doing this, though it does occur to me that people died here for not walking down, too.
-That thought gets no traction.
-Eventually, sheep-like, I mutter a little baaa, and amble along with the flock. I do want to get an answer to how they got water to the fortress, so many thousands of years ago. And, evidently, that question is on everyone’s mind, too, and he saves the answer until we are at the end of the tour. It wasn’t easy, and involved channels, ingenuity, reservoirs and luck, but no wells.
-He resolves the questions of the idly curious. But, for me, as soon as he mentions luck, I feel any real answer slipping away. A long way away.
-That the Jews would choose to defend this place, and eventually commit mass suicide and the Romans would go to such trouble and time to breach their defenses leaves me staring at this implacable rock plateau, imagining one of the many small black birds deciding to peck away at it until it’s gone and asking how long before it’s gone, before it’s all gone?
-An eternity? Or just the beginning of Eternity?
-We're down at the Dead Sea now where people cover themselves in mud and float in the water, where you can't sink.
-Sorely not tempted, I forgo the experience.
-The bathers walk around in swim suits so ill fitted to their bodies, and dripping with mud, that I think that they probably shouldn't.
-I walk towards the Dead Sea, to a sign announcing the lowest point on Earth, except that since the installation of the sign, the water has receded another half mile and the water level itself has dropped fifty more feet.
-But for the fact that it is already dead, this sea would be on life-support.
-Yet amid all this hard rock, sulphur-smelling mud and undrinkable water, an industry has arisen devoted to beauty.
-Corpore sano.
-On the way back to Jerusalem, a woman sitting in front of the bus asks me where I am from. I say Oregon and she volunteers that she resides in California. Close enough when you're 11 time zones away. She and her friend are staying in Tel Aviv and are seeing Israel by bus. She lives in San Diego and wants to be on TV, in Survivor, or The Amazing Race, or The Mole. She's tried out for all of them.
-They ate at McDonalds the night before. I do the best I can. I recommend a restaurant in Jaffa, the beautiful crusader city near where they are staying, but they have never heard of it—of Jaffa, that is.
-They are fun to talk to, but...
I can see why other travelers just shake their heads at Americans.
-Still, rolling along with a would-be participant in The Amazing Race passes the time, while affording me a mirror in which to observe myself in this far-off land. As much as I might like to explain away this mirror image American as not-me, mirror images don’t exist without the original image to animate them.
-I can't believe how much I've learned, here in Jerusalem, not being part of a group. Exploring, looking, poking, probing, stumbling, asking, stopping, thinking, I've learned so much.
Especially how to type on this damned, small keyboard of my telephone!
-Back in the Old City, I look around at the Haredim, the Ultra-orthodox, so full of piss and vinegar, who are real pains in the butt for everyone. I have to admire the Jewish state, an entity of this material world, for trying to respect and encourage a part of their own culture to seek what they believe to be the highest good, which happens to be not of this world and is, in fact, inimical to the existence of the state of Israel itself.
-The Haredim possess the courage of doubt-free commitment.
-They are in this place to know God, and they demand that Israel acknowledge this.
-Nothing else matters.
-After the martyrs of Masada came the Romans, and after the Romans came the Christians, and after the Christians came the Muslims.
-It’s a big, big rock for a small, small bird.
-I'm not really sure that I'm on the same page as the Jewish Zealots who committed suicide at Masada. The two women and three children who hid themselves and saved themselves appeal to a part of me.
-The women from San Diego had never heard of Petra, in Jordan. I had to start from scratch.
-On how many different levels do we all see the world?
The first woman said that she understands that she is a very forceful personality, that that's why they didn't pick her for Survivor; too powerful. The other one said that the Survivor couldn't even remember her friend’s last name. She chuckles.
-Speaking of chuckles, as I am typing this, my friend Steve calls from home asking if I want to go golfing. A blast from the other world. Mobile phones are so weird. No one knows where you are.
-What universe am I calling?
-What universe is calling me?
JERUSALEM DAY
-It is a beautiful, fragile place.
Today is Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the annexation, or should I say "return," of the city to Israeli possession.
-Kids everywhere wave every size of national flag.
-Not something you would see at home.
-So this is an amazing night to be in Jerusalem. There are Jews everywhere celebrating astonishingly, yet a young Arab woman passed by and we exchanged big smiles. What a wonderful experience.
With all the turmoil, I am still tearing up mightily, tears for all that has happened, for what is now, and for what so many people would like to see happen in the future.
-I wouldn't have missed this for the world.
-Of course, coming back from the restaurant, I pass through the bus terminal where all the shuttle buses are heading back to the Palestinian towns of Bethlehem, and Jericho and they are not celebrating, but I carry that Arab woman's smile with me as a small token of hope.
-Back at the hotel, I'm surprised to see that no one seems to know about all the excitement among the Jews, taking place only two hundred yards away but, crucially, outside the walls of the Old City. Especially since, trust me, these Armenian Christians don't see things the Palestinian way, either.
-Bubble People.
-People of the Bubble.
-One item that I love in the International Herald Tribune is the "in our pages" review of events that happened years ago. Today is the 50th anniversary of the winning of the West Virginia primary by John Kennedy. I remember that. In fact, he came back to Wheeling later to thank West Virginia for the victory, upon which occasion I managed to smack him in the face while I ran alongside his car as he left our football stadium. You couldn't get that close to the president now. Probably shouldn't have been able to then, as it turned out.
-I leave the old city and the Armenian Hospice and transfer myself to the American Colony Hotel.
-What a change! The way I like it: leaving my little insect-infested monk’s cell and coming to where, as I check in, the fellow behind the counter says, "I'm sorry, Mr. Chapman but the room is not quite ready. Would you like a glass of champagne while you wait?"
-Days of fleas, days of wine and roses.
-While walking here, I passed through a demonstration outside the American consulate, an Israeli demonstration against Obama. With the Israelis, Obama lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Actually, I do sais quoi. He’s trying for a certain evenhandedness in the Middle East, a region of the world where uneven is the only even.
-I walk further on and passing me, in the opposite direction, an older Arab woman rides in a small car, teaching a younger one to drive: all eyes intently straight ahead, all shoulders rigidly back against the seat, all so familiar to me, having taught my four children to drive. I don't think that the two women appreciate the fact of the demonstration back the way they are headed.
-All things come to those who walk through Jerusalem.
-On Nablus road, behind a group of pilgrims, a woman, distraught and weeping, supported by two burley men, straggles out of the alternative burial place of Jesus. No one seems overly concerned. I think they call it Jerusalem Syndrome.
-You're never far from a drama here.
-Eating at the same restaurant every previous night, and here again tonight, I tell the waitress that I really like Jerusalem (she's from here and agrees with me) and I tell her that I'm from Oregon, in the USA. I realize that when I say I like it here, it means a lot to her, but when someone tells me that they like Oregon, I don't have her reaction. I realize that I don't need someone else's friendship as much as Jerusalemites feel that they need mine.
JERUSALEM TO AMMAN
Sitting in the al-Nijmeh taxi depot, I wait for the mini-bus to the Allenby Bridge where we cross the Jordan River into Jordan, the country. Arabs, not Jews, seem to run the taxi services here, taxis for the common people, that is. This is one of those taxis that only departs when every seat is occupied. So we sit. The hotel offered the idea of a private car to the bridge, for $80, but this mini-bus only costs $10. I figure that the difference will come in handy later.
-Older Arab women and Arab music surround me. Tres tipique.
-The tourist lifestyle entices me to insulate myself from the Arab world of Jerusalem, to assume that I would rather avoid all the "unpleasantness."
-How silly.
We travel with our minds open, more open for some people, less so for others. “Unpleasantness” is a slippery concept and can find its way very easily into a mind clasped tightly shut. “Pleasantness” is a bigger, clumpier, more amorphous experience and needs a larger aperture. Only by opening our minds widely might the bigness of goodness enter.
-For all the Jewish self-satisfaction about the "return" of Jerusalem to them, I don't think we've seen the last of regime change.
-Well, back in the taxi, we're full and we're off.
Uh-oh. Everyone takes great pains to buckle seatbelts.
-One of the women just offered me a Hall's cough drop.
-Just went through into Jordan.
Costs $50 to leave Israel.
-I don't think that this is the way most American tourists get to Petra.
-There's a lot to be said for having one’s paperwork in order.
-This land is as desolate on this side of the border as on the other.
-Not having a tour guide to handle all the protocol certainly requires staying alert to many more nuanced interactions, like the fact that the bus driver just takes away my passport. My wife, Deb, is a lot better at making sense of mildly inscrutable situations.
-I tend to wait them out.
-I sit next to an English couple who are talking to some Americans. We all go through the gates together. Then they split up. They hug each other, probably at the instigation of the Americans, because the English woman exclaims, "I don't think I have ever hugged so many people in my life!" sounding exasperated yet somewhat embarrassed by the pressing together of bodies.
-I go on to look for transportation into Amman and am discovered by both a cab driver and a bus driver. The cab driver wins the bidding war (I love talking to cabbies!); the bus driver looks disgruntled. Seven dinars (10 dollars), not bad. As I get in the cab I tell him his tire needs air. He says that if I hire him to drive to Petra, he will put air in tire, saying, "I know Americans like to be safe." I tell him it would be good for him, too. Anyway, on the way into town, he puts air into the tire. I can’t decide if I want him to drive me all the way to Petra. He assures me that if we don't make it, I don't pay him. Hmmm.
-The cab is decrepit, even worse than Santa’s cab back in Eugene. Shabby, but I get to ride with the window down. I give thanks to the Lord of Blue Sky and Open Air. On the highway, we pass the English couple in a nice new car with a driver, and the windows closed.
-They are probably not going to Petra in a cab like this one.
-Where everywhere else in Amman, you see pictures of King Hussein and his son, checking into the Marriott Hotel, the pictures are of J. W. Marriott and his son, the rulers of their own domain.
-I tell the concierge that I want to walk down to the Roman amphitheater, to which he replies "not possible." I thank him and walk there. Truly, you have to be careful what decisions you want other people to make for you. Someone is always willing, especially if there's money to be made, to take choices out of your hands.
-On the other hand, I can't continually say "no."
-“No” is so very small aperture.
-Negativity entails an opportunity cost.
--Saying “yes” opens doors, though some of those doors may slam shut on my fingers.
-I walk down into the main part of town, and then, when I decide to return to the hotel, I opt for a taxi.
-Khaled (the name of the cab driver) comes out of nowhere.
-Taxi drivers can smell a fare so easily. I might as well be a falafel standing by the side of the road, steaming.
-He says to pay him anything I like, nothing even. Right. I entertain the notion as a thought experiment, and reject it; as he means for me to do. We settle on three dinars before leaving the amphitheater. He's a good guy. He asks what I do and I tell him my job is to be a tourist so I can hire a guy like him. His job is to be a cab driver and my job is to pay him, and, to do that, my wife sends me money so I can pass it along to him.
-He says that I am funny guy and that he likes me. We are both laughing. He shows a picture of his wife and daughter on his mobile and I show the picture of my wife, Deb. "Very beautiful", he says, "you are indeed a lucky man."
-He says that he gives all his money to his wife.
-I tell him that my wife sends me money so that I can give it to him so that he can, in turn, give it to his wife. We decide it would be simpler to give her the address of my wife, Deb, and they can work it out.
-We laugh some more.
-We start to talk about how much a cab costs. He says it costs 41,000 Jordanian dinars. He says that if I give him the money, he would pay it back in eight years. I suggest that he could also, the next time that I return to Amman, give me free taxi rides. I tell him that I don't have that much money right now, but I will ask my wife to work harder.
-We laugh again.
-By this time we reach the hotel and he says, as I get out, "I think we could be good friends."
-Sweet.
-This guy at the hotel tells me I need to try Jordanian wine, "baitutti," which is made here, unlike the Jordanian wine in restaurants, where they buy grapes from France or South Africa and then make the wine here. The real stuff, "baitutti," you need to go to the store and order and they bring it the next day. Somehow, they make it in their homes.
-I’ll look for it in Petra.
-I decide to go with the taxi guy from the airport, instead of renting a car myself, partly because I would like to give the bucks directly to a local guy instead of a big car company. I'll try to keep him on the right side of the highway.
-Reading an article on how couples stay committed, which asserts that the important thing is to do "challenging and important things together," I’ve decided that that's what I feel about this trip and this journal. It feels like my wife and I are taking this trip together.
Can you believe that this hotel has no wireless Internet? I tell them that it is ridiculous. They sigh and say that everyone is complaining.
-
-Imagine complaining that there is no Internet connection in Jordan, in the middle of the Middle East! How did T.E. Lawrence make do?
-Meanwhile, a wedding takes over the hotel.
-Just to mix it up, the groom is dancing with the men and the bride dances with the women. And then they both dance together. A good sign.
-I ask one of the guys in the hotel if this is a big wedding (it looks big), or a small one.
_ He says “small.”
-I will be quite happy if my daughter has a wedding half as small as this!
-This makes traveling the unique experience that it is. I can sit here with my glass of wine and stare at people doing what they feel is most natural and I think is most exotic, and neither of us feels like we are doing anything wrong.
-In fact, “right” and “wrong” seem so superfluous so far from one’s own value system.
-They dance and I marvel; I am enchanted by the music and vivacity, they are oblivious to all but themselves.
-Which is as it should be.
My wife and I were married in front of a Justice of the Peace, with two friends, and a few city employees wondering when they might get their lunchroom back as it approached the noon hour.
-Nothing like this raucous party in Amman.
-Yet, just as poignant.
-A commitment, when made as an oath for all time, crushes every wavering thought.
-Grinds them into powder.
-Into fine sand.
-Desert sand.
PETRA
-I’ve made it to Petra, brain worn out. Three hours of trying to talk to and understand the cab driver, driving from Amman to Petra, has been fatiguing.
-I wait to check-in.
-I can't get the Internet to work on my phone. Absurd, yes, but I’m comimg to take Internet service in the middle of the desert for granted.
-I decide to take an exploratory walk down into Petra this evening and then go through it more extensively tomorrow.
-I walk down the path that leads into the ancient city, a path filled with horses and buggies coming and going. I arrive at what seems to be a natural stopping place, a cleft in the rock wall where the path dives sharply downward.
-I sit myself down to watch the interaction of undernourished men and donkeys.
-No one comes out a winner.
Heading up and out, many people ride out in carts pulled by these same bedraggled donkeys and horses. The owners hit them with switches going down and hit them with switches again heading back uphill to the entrance.
-The mutual bond between living creatures loosens in the hot sun.
-This is somewhat like hiking into the Grand Canyon; easy to go down, difficult to climb out after a hot day with little water.
-Petra, in all its spectacular, barren brutality, compares ever so vaguely with Jerusalem. On the one hand, the divisive elements have long since disappeared. No one is going to die to claim this piece of ground, but it feels so much like the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City. The overarching, claustrophobic path leads downwards into the earth, funneling hordes of people past the vendors of "antique" and "museum quality!" doodads. But missing are the smells.
-Inside and down in, as I sit in the shade high on the hill overlooking the Inner Valley of Petra, in a cave carved into the hill’s rock face, I answer my phone.
-My brother begins telling me that my mother is sick, very sick. In that she has been sickly for so long, I’m not surprised at a turn for the worse. I ask him if he thinks that I should come home immediately.
-“Where are you?”
- He can’t quite grasp that I am talking to him from a cave in an ancient city in the Jordanian desert. I impress upon him that I am quite isolated.
–He wants me to accede to him the power of attorney over her health status. She and all her children have already agreed on her end-of-life request, to use no extraordinary means to stay alive.
-If we can’t be alive, we might as well be dead.
-One minute I am silently contemplating the remains of a thousands-of-years-old city, and the next, the concept of “power of attorney.”
-In the blowing sand, the vestiges of a civilization’s long life and long-ago death mix with the flowing images of my mother’s own long life, and impending parting.
-A concurrency of existences, and not.
-Concurrent because of me.
-We construct our own web of coincidences.
-Perched so high above the valley, I can see the dry riverbed and the restored columns of the old city.
-Once the water disappeared, so did the people.
-With my eyes I can follow the path through the ruins and up into the mountains on the other side of the valley, a path that leads to what everyone calls the “Monastery,” a climb of eight hundred long, hard steps up into the high desert. It may have served as a retreat for monks, or earlier, as a palace for some wealthy merchant. This city is, after all, on the original Silk Route and had established itself as a city of considerable wealth even before the Romans discovered it. They captured and held it for several centuries, and then left.
-They forgot about it.
-Everyone forgot about it.
-Without water, it withered away, of little use to anyone.
-I decide to climb the mountain to the “Monastery.” I buy a bottle of water from one of the many stands that line the old riverbed.
-An ascent of 800 steps is a formidable climb, as is sharing the narrow path with cantankerous French tourists on their beleaguered donkeys, yelling at the donkeys to slow down while the handlers yell and swat the donkeys with their switches, doing everything in their power to speed them up, along with young boys running up and down the trail wanting to be “guides” for groups of tourists ascending with me, or other groups, smugly satisfied, now descending.
-I get the idea that the number 800 resembles the “7x7” in the Bible, maybe a very large number, but not necessarily accurate.
-The experience reminds me of trekking down to the Colorado River and back up out of the Grand Canyon to the Rim Village and having had to share the path with mules.
-When I reached the top of the climb out of Petra’s valley, I found a small snack shop full of young Italians with their cameras and backpacks, laughing at the French for using donkeys.
-Americans are scarce in Petra.
-Different peoples do different countries in different ways and at different times of the year:
The Japanese, with colorful clothes and large cameras, in Piazza San Marco.
The French, jauntily, vigorously, carrying their own backpacks in Katmandu.
The Russians, oblivious of winter back home, on the beaches of Tel Aviv.
The Italians, young and laughing, here, far from the softness of Bella Italia.
-After taking a few pictures, I start down the path, finding the descent on the irregular stones to be every bit as difficult as the ascent, while seeing the path before me and the valley stretching out to the horizon reminds me that I am a long way from home.
-Along the path, at the occasional wide spot, people have set up small souvenir stands to sell all manner of “authentic, rare” trinkets. Mostly, I walk by without stopping, but this one striking and assertive woman with her small child tells me that I can have any item; I need only name a price. Now this is what everyone says, “Just name a price! Any price!” Normally, I simply ignore them. Once you utter a price, you are dragged into the haggling process and it’s very difficult to extricate yourself without rudeness, or buying something you don’t really want. But this woman intrigues me because, unlike most of the vendors, she speaks English well.
-I decide to explore an observation of mine with her.
-I ask her, rather than my pointing to something that I would like, would she point out all the items that she would be willing to sell for one Jordanian Dinar.
-In the Middle East, this is not how business transactions work. Trust me.
I might as well have reached down and grabbed a handful of sand from beneath my feet and put it directly into her gas tank. Her merchant engine ground to a halt.
-She refuses.
-She won’t do it.
-Maybe she can’t do it.
-Crazy foreigners.
-I try to tell her that a large part of the world does business using price tags as a model, with no bargaining.
-We talk at length until she finally, reluctantly, shows me a few things that she will part with for one JD.
-Beginning to feel that she would rather just get rid of me, I buy one of her offerings.
-I headed on down the path, mulling over the way that the Middle East does business.
-And politics.
-Everyone wants the other person to make the first offer so they can then begin bargaining down. Every opening offer, in this scenario, is provisional. Bargaining, to be most effective, demands a one-to-one relationship. But here, once a bid becomes public, bargaining, except as an assertive display of power gamesmanship, fails to discover a mutually acceptable price. It’s as if the entire bus of tourists want to haggle, en masse, with all the members of the merchant’s family, simultaneously, to be certain that no one cheats.
-The point remains that everyone assumes that, on every level, bargaining offers the best way of finding the lowest common acceptable agreement in whatever transaction. The unnerving part about haggling is the fear that after all is decided, both sides will feel that had they only bargained harder, they would have gotten more. Eventually, the negatives of losing outweigh the possibilities of any gains to be won.
-It aggravates a person used to price tags.
As I continue to descend back into the valley, I notice that most of my fellow walkers ignore the numerous hawkers by the roadside. To my mind, people shy away from starting a process that, by now, everyone knows will be difficult to end.
-I think that I might make a more serious effort to remake the culture of commerce in the Middle East, by starting with one convert.
-I walk further along the path to where it widens and affords more room for larger retail operations. Then I pass slowly by the merchants until one guy, speaking English, accosts me. He is relatively well-dressed, and because he has a large tent full of tourist items and therefore seems ambitious, I stop. I take the initiative and approach him directly. This surprises him.
-I ask him, pointblank, why he doesn’t use fixed prices.
-He just looks at me.
-I start to explain.
-I pick up a green and blue plate and ask him what was the lowest price that he had ever accepted for this particular style of plate. I might as well be trying to pry a Jordanian state secret out of him. Reluctantly, he admits to eight JD, Jordanian Dinars. Then I ask for the highest price that he had ever been able to get for the same style. Smugly, he tells me, 12 JD.
-I tell him that many Western tourists feel uncomfortable with the haggling process, that the effort to buy even one thing precludes multiple purchases. Impulse buying is out of the question.
-Instead, I suggest that he set a firm price somewhere between the lowest and highest prices that he has received. Then, he should put up a sign extolling “Fairest Prices in Petra,” rather than simply yelling to everyone who passes his store that he has the lowest prices, which every other storekeeper does and no tourist believes.
-He has a difficult time with this idea. He keeps saying that people like to bargain. But I counter that he misses all the people who are put off by haggling and, instead, buy their souvenirs from hotel gift shops, paying more but not needing to haggle.
-Then I ask him where he acquires all the merchandise that he sells. He surely didn’t make it. No, he says, he goes to a wholesale dealer and buys what he thinks he can most readily resell.
-“Does he insist upon set prices?” I ask him.
-“Yes”, he tells me.
-“Why don’t you haggle with him?”
-“I don’t like to haggle,” he says.
We both start laughing.
-We part with a handshake.
-Who knows, maybe it will eventually lead to peace in the Middle East.
-What a wonderful walk back out of Petra, through the stretching, arching, muscular rock, hewn by thousands of years of patience.
-It would be hard to look forward to anything after this; I’m glad I saved Petra until last.
-It’s a good thing that it is this impressive because I am getting tired of traveling.
-I eat outside, in the roof garden restaurant of the hotel. One thing that I have avoided is finding little, out of the way, Arabic spots, where I might need to eat inside.
If I'm eating alone, I prefer outdoors because, with the darkening sky and the breezes, and the pulsing stars, all are like eating out with old friends.
-Well, the music changes from soft Arabian to soft easy- listening.
"I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" and then on to "My Way." Shameless.
Just in time, back to soft Arabic.
I scheduled with Mahmod, the cab driver who drove me down here, to call him and tell him if I need him to come and take me back to Amman. I ask one of the waiters if he would help me call. He wants to know what it is all about. When I explain, he says his father will do it. Same price.
-Cutthroat world, this.
-I'm glad that I am in the going-home process.
PETRA TO TEL AVIV
-I check out of the hotel. Ouch! I think that when I booked the room I must have mistaken dinars for dollars. Way more expensive than I expected.
-I wait for the cab driver. He doesn't know what I look like and I don't know him. One more little bit of uncertainty.
-The rendezvous goes remarkably well, but then Ahmad's father, the cab driver looks a little like me, to wit, short grayish-white hair and scraggly beard. Except that he doesn't have any teeth and I do, Inshallah. He doesn't speak much English so it will be a quiet trip, at least in that sense.
Petra to Tel Aviv in one day, with a border crossing thrown in, plus transferring in Jerusalem.
-All with public transportation.
-Unless he kills a few people on the way, two pedestrians, unbeknownst to them, having already escaped with their lives, we might make the Allenby Bridge (King Hussein Bridge, depending on who you’re talking to) by noon.
-I can see why they say "Inshallah (if God wills it)" so much in this country.
Which make me wonder, does “Inshallah” engender a slippery sense throughout society of an underlying uncertainty about any fact, process, or possibility, or did the uncertainty predate the phrase? And if it did so, what word might they have used before Mohammed invented Islam?
-I wish that this driver would stop waving his arms around and stay on our side of the road.
-I can't tell if it's because of the heat that my palms are wet, or from abject fear.
-This trip appears to be less routine, and more subject to the will of God, than I had originally imagined.
-In the middle of Jordanian nowhere, the engine stops for no reason that I can tell.
-And then restarts.
-I'm not sure I can adequately describe how desolate this landscape is. And the more often the car drifts to a dismal, dying stop and, wondrously, jerks back to life, the more desolate the landscape becomes.
-Death Valley, with a lake.
-I suggest bad gasoline.
He offers "Pompa? Like this?" and holds up a cylinder of some sort.
-Bad sign.
-The engine continues to cut in and out, even at 140 kph.
-I’m sweating profusely. Must be the heat.
-We drift down from 140 kph to two, and just before we come to a complete stop, the old beast resurrects itself once again.
-His thought, it seems, is to outrun the evil gas genie.
-Back to 140.
-At least, at 140 the motor has a longer time to rally before we reach a dead stop.
-Not sure if panic is yet in order, but sweaty palms sure are.
-Still might just be the heat.
-Somewhat comforting to see that even down here, by the shore of the Dead Sea, the guy has cell service, as he tries to use his phone at this speed, while the car jumps and shakes.
-That humans can live both in this country, with this landscape where rocks grow on more rocks, and also in verdant Oregon, amazes me.
-We coast almost to a stop again.
-I dread coming to a complete stop. Which we do.
-I was wrong. There's no cell service.
-I am now wondering if this is the moment to panic.
-First, I have to ditch this cab.
-A taxi, an old, old Toyota van, like I owned twenty years ago, a taxi even lower on the scale of taxis than this one paralyzed on the side of the road with me in it, stops to help us. It doesn't look like I’m going anywhere waiting for cab #1 to figure this out. I’m thinking that my plane leaves from Tel Aviv tomorrow at 1:00 A.M. I decide to abandon this cab. I pay the first guy something and agree to pay taxi #2 the remainder, if he can get me to the border at King Hussein Bridge.
-No one, remember, speaks English at all well.
Even though we are less than half way to the bridge, the driver of cab #1 can’t stop yelling that I am cheating him out of his fare, that the cab that stopped is cheating him too.
- I edge into their old bus, without turning my back towards Mahmoud’s father, leaving him, taxi driver #1, fuming by the side of the road. I feel that this has probably happened to him before, witness the spare pump. I didn’t want him to hit me with it.
-We then proceed to drive up into the hills, delivering bags of pita bread and a pile of plastic chairs.
-I'm feeling very patient, stoic even.
-This taxi driver #2 then drops me on the side of the road, where taxi driver #3 (who speaks ever so slightly more English), tells me to get in. Deciding that I don't have much choice, in I get.
-For 20 dinars, i.e., twenty fingers and then pointing north down the road, we arrange that he will take me to the Allenby Bridge.
-So, we are put-putting up the road when taxi #1, at his normal 140 kph, passes us. I still feel better where I am.
-I'm even starting to think that I may be getting pretty good at surviving the vicissitudes of off-piste travel.
-That's when I remember that I left my passport back in Petra.
-Finally, panic seems appropriate.
-I take refuge in catatonia.
-I stare out the front window.
-I look around and see that I’m sitting among four Arabs who speak very, very little English. I’m going to hope that they know a little bit more than they admit to.
-I start to assemble my train of explanation.
-Sitting in the middle of the rear seat, I lean forward, up between the guys in the front seat, while dodging all the fringe and medals and icons hanging from the ceiling.
-Using mostly nouns, I manage to get the idea of stupidity and no passport across.
-Except for the rumble of the highway, silence.
-Nothing is said and nothing much happens for a while.
-Hoping that their silence might mean that they are considering my predicament, I consider my predicament.
-We are moving in precisely the opposite direction from my passport. I can, at this early moment in the crisis, only imagine that I will need to return to Petra, many hours now behind us.
-Feeling awfully alone, I imagine only that I have to get myself out of this by myself. I can’t see how it might be possible to get back to Petra and then return north again to reach the Allenby Bridge before it closes for the night.
-In the meantime, the little bus put-puts along. I’ve said about all I could say to the guys around me, though they do seem to be talking among themselves.
-About me, maybe, but who knows.
-Inshallah.
-At some point they pull off to the side of the road. They get out and I do, too. A big guy comes over and asks me, in English, what the problem is. I try to explain that I need a fast car to take me back to Petra and then return to the King Hussein Bridge.
-He says he can do it.
-He has a brother who lives in New Jersey. So, of course, he can do it. Things can, therefore, happen.
-Small world.
-This will cost a lot. I know this and he knows this.
-But have they found the passport back in Petra? I feel like I want to know this before committing to this plan.
-I ask to use his phone. We eventually get through and, yes, the passport's there and I explain my plan and the time problem and the concierge of the hotel, becoming my new best friend in the world, says they will send it up immediately by courier and meet me at Allenby Bridge in plenty of time and I am elated and I tell the man, whose brother lives in New Jersey, which therefore, makes us best friends,
-He's not elated at all.
-Vast sums just vanished from his plans. I say that I will pay him to take me to the bridge, but he's not happy.
-I offer him more than the now short trip is worth, but I am not feeling sorry.
-I realize that this has worked out so much better than I might ever have hoped, and I appreciate what he has done for me and I tell him so, many times.
He's not impressed but I get into his nephew's car, with Arab hip-hop music blaring, and head out for the bridge.
Omar, his nephew, leaves me at the entrance to the Jordanian border control and I give him a big tip because I realize that uncle is going to take everything for himself. Omar’s a good guy and we shake hands warmly.
-I wait in the Jordanian exit lounge a long time.
-Finally, the courier’s eyes meet the frazzled eyes of the only white guy in the lounge, and he hands me my passport. -I pay him, with a big tip.
-Any problem that can be solved with ready cash is a small one.
- I board the bus to cross the bridge into Israel.
There, I meet these three German guys who have just completed the Germany-to-Jordan car rally, a drive of 6,000 kilometers. The idea is to drive a car that is at least 20 years old, spend very little on food, bring something from every country you pass through, like a bottle of water, stay somewhere for less than 15 euros a night, and, at the end of the trip, donate the car to charity.
-Took 'em 20 days.
-There’s always a better adventure story out there.
I now have to get a mini-bus to Jerusalem, cross the city somehow, get another bus to Tel Aviv, then get cab to my hotel, all in all, a trip that is still only an inchoate dream but no longer a nightmare.
-It's hard to describe what happens next, because it seems so improbable. I am asking if there is a taxi going directly to Tel Aviv from the Allenby Bridge when this very pretty woman, an Arab woman in full head scarf, very stylish, with the cutest daughter, walks up to me and says, "Come with me, we are going to Tel Aviv, also. We can share a cab in Jerusalem."
-I say yes, without knowing what else to say. Her English is great, and there is no misunderstanding her forceful offer.
-My stereotyped image of Arab women is that they don't talk to men outside their family.
-Well, that opinion changes in about five seconds, though I am still not sure how this will work. We're not talking about a pick-up here, but rather a woman who seems to know where she’s going, and who might be needing some help.
-Nothing is said as she and her daughter, and then I, board the bus. As we prepare to leave and the driver asks where I am going, she, sitting up front, turns around looks at me and says that we are together.
-I must have looked puzzled because she smiles and says, "Trust me."
-It has been a long, puzzling day and my puzzler is sore.
-"Well, okay, why not?” I think.
-We reach Jerusalem. I grab her bag. She changes money. We get a taxi. She gives directions. I pay for us. She finds the bus. I grab her bag. We board the bus. She pays for us.
-And off we go.
-To extend the surreality, the Arab taxi driver speaks Italian to me (I can speak Italian), all the way across Jerusalem, to the bus station and the bus to Tel Aviv.
-Maybe the more correct word is "magical".
-So, we are sitting together on the trip to Tel Aviv and she tells me that, back there, we were in run-down East Jerusalem. I tell her that I know where we were because my first hotel was near there, the Alcazar Hotel. She not only knows it but her grandparents live nearby.
-This kind of thing doesn't usually happen to me. Deb finds all kinds of connections with people, but me, not so much.
-We talk about how difficult it is for her as a young woman, even with a baby, to travel without a man.
-I feel useful.
-Her husband comes from the occupied territories and can't come into Israel. They now live in Qatar. But she has to come back every six months to maintain some kind of residency relationship with Israel. She is a civil engineer, as is her husband.
-For as much as bureaucracy and politics seem to impinge on her daily life, she loves her life and laughs very easily. -It's hard to understand why Israel doesn't want this family to be citizens.
-She says not to worry about my Mom, and how sick she is, that Allah will care for her.
-When we reach the Tel Aviv main bus station, we run to catch her bus, she carrying her sleeping baby and me dragging her substantial bag. We arrive at the last moment. They hop on and we wave, like real friends.
-I head off to a cab to the hotel, out near the airport.
-That's how I find myself sitting in the hotel room, eating Chinese takeout.
-One of the most miraculous days in my history of travel!
-Escaped from a nutty cab driver.
-Found by a group of wonderful Jordanian hangers-about.
-Got my passport back.
-Rescued by an Arab woman and her beautiful child.
-In Jerusalem, discussed Rome with an Arab cab driver speaking Italian.
-It goes on and on.
Looking back I feel it was not so much that I got lucky, but that I trusted people, that I let go
LEAVING FRANKFURT
Now I am in the plane from Frankfurt, on the way to Washington D. C., and then on to Jacksonville. To see my mother who is very sick, but any more than that I don't know.
-We'll see.
-She has recovered before.
-In any event, this trip to the Middle East is over and another trip is beginning.
-I am now in Airline World, which is a subset of the real world.
-Everyone sits silently.
-One seeks, simply, to emerge intact.
-I imagine religions in sporting terms.
-Primitive religions are like baseball teams, each team a different city-state with their own local religions: the Yankees, Redsox, Dodgers, with their own pantheon of local gods, each fan wearing the symbol, the jersey, of his favorite god, and when city states fight one another, their gods do battle. Religions wax and wane as the fortunes of their gods do. Within each religion, every fan has a personal connection to one or another of the major gods within the world of baseball.
-At some point, the religion of football comes out of the east, a different sport, more brutal, more primitive, more vigorous, and proceeds to overcome the religion of baseball, sweeping all before it. Yet, while it manages to supersede baseball as a religion, on a deeper level it is still a religion based on local religions: Cowboys, Bears, Giants, under the big-umbrella idea of Primitive Religion, with the same affinity for local gods.
In primitive society, fans might worship differing gods in multiple religions.
The gods don't care.
-The Jews did it differently.
-They organized themselves as a People. They didn’t have a personal relationship with gods outside the context of themselves as a group. In fact, this was forbidden.
-Judaism became Sport itself, and Yahweh was their god and they were the chosen fan base.
-They did not (or weren't supposed to) have individual idols before them.
-Sometimes the sports idols of Primitivism seduced them, though ultimately they would come back to the realization of themselves as the People of Sport, the one True God, and the Torah as the writings of the NCAA.
-Christians took the primitive idea of participatory belief and the Judaic idea of the One True Fan and combined it into the religion of the triathlon, where the fan is also the celebrant and each fan must establish his/her own personal relationship with the divine. Christians compete as members of a community, yet remain responsible for their own, individual salvation.
-It's instructive that the entire commitment starts with baptism, as the triathlon begins in the water.
-Everyone runs at his or her own speed. The fan and the adherent become one.
-Islam, meanwhile, is golf.
-The People of the Book.
-The individual submits to the rule of Law.
- Worship takes place in the blinding light of Fairness.
- There is no compromise.
- To cheat is to be condemned for all eternity.
- Bobby Jones is the Prophet and St. Andrews is Mecca.
-
-The world is experiencing a population boom. When a population expands, it is usually because conditions are conducive for growth. If humanity is growing than human life is finding itself in a propitious environment and is responding accordingly.
-Humans want to be born.
-Something good is happening in this world and souls want to participate by being born.
-The universe is encouraging humans to procreate.
-Is it a sign of wishful thinking to imagine that the proliferation of births and the overall increase in population might be due to more optimistic souls wanting to enter the physical plane? That they are being enticed by a generally ameliorating climate for spiritual improvement?
-The plane of the physical offers opportunities for working beyond stasis, beyond Karma.
-Souls choose to be born, or not to be born, depending upon whether there are possibilities for movement towards ultimate unification with the Eternal Godhead.
-Baby steps.
-We all sometimes fall back, but we know, deep down, what we have to do.
And how we have to do it.
-We have to get ourselves born, but on terms that favor our advancement spiritually.
-And then we must make the most of every opportunity to grow.
-We will, of course, have all the opportunities that we need to reincarnate but the joys of progress are so palpable that once one catches hold of the process, a certain impatience asserts itself, an impatience that, irritatingly, may make progress more difficult.
-My brother (younger by a year) has decided to have a face lift, lose weight, and have hair transplants. We choose our own reincarnations.
-Back in Oregon.
-I've been away long enough to be intrigued by the water simply falling out of our sky, unbidden.
-I have come from the Middle East, the land of miracles, and here is one we take for granted.
In every God I met
In Jerusalem,
I came to believe.
I came to believe
In every God
In Jerusalem.
-My mother is, was, and for me will always be, the most wonderful and sweetest human being, but it's even more mysterious than that, but I'm out of words.
-Every day seems to have a narrative, when I pay attention and it takes me with it.
-My mom is no longer fighting for her life but easing into death.
-A woman from Oregon, who was taking advantage of our states’ right-to-die law, said that she was not so much afraid of dying, but that she would be sorry to be no longer alive.
-My brother called to say that the doctors have increased my mother's dosage of morphine and that he thinks that she is soon to go, but she seems to think otherwise. She is a tough old bird and I love her for it.
She has said so many times that she doesn't even want to be alive, to the extent that she has tried to commit suicide twice, that to be this determined to live only says that, ultimately, she is afraid to die. Afraid of what she will find when she walks through that door, though if you aren't sure of the existence of god, there's no point in worrying about hell.
-This is about three hours later.
-Mom died.
-Bob just called me and, even though we knew that it couldn't have ended any other way, still it seems lonelier in this world all of a sudden.
-It's really easy to look up at the big, white, fluffy clouds and the warm sun and imagine her spirit as free, and part of all this light.
-I called my sister Barbara, who was there when she finally let go, not easily, but at last. My Mom had a desire to stick around and wasn't going to leave until she was assured that the time was right. Barbara told her that she was safe and then took this little moisture applicator, used to wet lips, and dipped it in some Pinot Grigio and wiped her lips with it and she said "ok" ten minutes later.
-What a dear sweet person.
-An idea seems so ephemeral, a slight mist over a morning landscape, all too easily dissipated by the breezes of time passing.
+
To write
To disappear
Maybe, to be remembered
+
-Barbara moistened her lips with a little white wine instead of water.
-My Mom, with her eyes closed, said, in effect, "I'm done" ten minutes later.
-On some level or other, she felt safe to let go.
-She lived in a nervous skin with nerve endings on the outside of her body. No longer. She’s at rest, now.
-I hope she passed on her will to live to the family line.
-It hardly is a coincidence that this trip of mine to such a religiously centered place as Jerusalem, where death and the past are the warp, and life and the present are the weft of the fabric of the city, ended with the death of my mother.
-It didn't start out that way; in fact, when I left she wasn't even sick.
-After I returned and as I visited her on her deathbed, I told her that I loved her and appreciated that she waited for me, so that I could say goodbye.
She opened and then closed her eyes.
-I like to think that she heard me.
-In Eugene, getting up early to walk, I find no one on the streets, I see not a single donkey, hear not a single call to prayers, find not a soul sitting on the curb selling grape leaves.
-It is raining.
-I never saw that in Israel.
-Ruminations are the chewing on life’s narratives.
-I go back to the motel where I left the little naked boy that I found running down the middle of the street at 4:00 a.m. so long ago. The young Indian woman, the owner of the motel, is only too willing to tell me how stupid she thought the parents were.
-"Hello! They were out partying! What were they thinking? You want a baby? Take care of the baby! I can't even stand to see the way some of the people in this neighborhood treat their dogs, but their own child!!!?”
-That night, she says, a grandmother showed up from somewhere, very quickly, to get the child. So she assumed that they lived nearby.
-I thank her and she thanks me.
-I find out later that the little boy had spent a week in the hospital, with some damage to his lungs because of the parent’s lifestyle. I never found out more than that, though I did come across Mike, the taxi driver, and told him that, last I heard, the little guy was getting some help.
Reading David Brooks today in The Times, he posits the life of someone who "did all the right things, not doing the things he wanted to do, but the things he felt he had to do to live, and how, now, he feels cheated by the fecklessness of his society."
I say, who gave this invented person any right at all to be born into this world at all? Where he could assume that the people who surround him would always be making decisions in his best interests?
I have just come back from Israel and Jordan where you get screwed from the time you wake up in the morning until the sun goes down, a world that has, in no way whatsoever, your best interests in mind.
-Just to dodge the constant drizzle of bird droppings all day long counts as success.
-Who in the hell does Brooks think he is and how can he presume to invent a man who feels irate, and whose response then is to join with other people who consider themselves entirely blameless and who say that they choose to want no part of the "down" of the "ups and downs" of existence?
I find Brooks, his straw man, and the whole notion of self- righteous selfishness, repellent.
-Jerusalem belongs to the Jews until someone takes it from them.
-They can hurry the process, or not.
-20,000 miles and three weeks ago, I sat right here on this couch and wondered what I might find so far away, and now I sit here and wonder what I did find.
-Trying to put the last few weeks in perspective, I can only believe that my trip to Jerusalem and Petra is all of a piece with Mom's passing on from this world and my managing to be a part of it.
-Life’s mysteries crush Death’s mysteries
until Death’s mysteries crush back.
-I am a coin, a circle with two sides, life and death. Flip me and I live, flip me again and I still live, or maybe I die. Flip me enough times and, at some point, I will die. But again, continue flipping and I get another opportunity to live. And on and on, until, finally, this spinning, expanding coin that is me becomes a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is infinite.
-Death is a larger, more pregnant experience than life, which comes across as more circumscribed, more difficult to see beyond.
-As being awake is more circumscribed than dreaming.
_Might dreaming be, in fact, our highest state of being?
_Might our conscious, everyday existence serve only to maintain our body, mind and soul so that we dream?
-Why must we devote so much time to sleep? Why can we absolutely not survive without sleep, without dreaming?
-In our battle for survival, sleep is precarious.
-Early in our history, being so fraught with the possibility of being eaten in our sleep, accommodating the need to dream must have been of the utmost importance to our survival.
+
We eat to live.
We live to sleep.
We sleep to dream.
We dream to truly live.
+
-We fear dreams because they seem undisciplined, and for the opposite reason, trust conscious existence.
-And alive, we quake at death.
It needn’t be that way.
-Every one of us would admit that we don't know everything but that we learn something new every second and that there is no real limit to our imagination. The only proscriptions are those that we place on ourselves.
-If I say, "Where is my Mom right now?” is there any sense to the word “now,” to somebody who has died?
-When I look out any window now and I see rain and large green maples, instead of scrub and rock, I know that I am in Oregon and not the Middle East, but my mind, and even my body because of the time lag, insist that it's not that easy to separate then from right now.
-Life unfolds concurrently.
-Many people wonder about my trip, and I do, too.
-"Did you ever feel threatened?" they always want to know.
-They never quite believe me when I say "No."
-In their minds, I came back from the Holy Land looking like an Old Testament prophet and speaking in tongues, when in reality, I simply didn’t shave, and I used words like "trusting people,” “liking Arabs and Jews and Christians,” “traveling alone,” “wife staying home,” “not being afraid,” and “all religions essentially seem the same".
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Thanks, Socrates.
He did not say that the figured-out life is not worth examining.
No comments:
Post a Comment